What a drag I’m becoming, thought Peter. If I don’t watch out I’ll become like Vera, who hobbles around in her baggy clothes and looks crabby all the time. Her biggest evening pleasure seemed to be sitting in her room eavesdropping and then banging on the wall and disrupting. He could have sworn that Vera considered it a sport to identify absolutely the least appropriate moment to bring out the heavy artillery.
Just because she didn’t seem to be getting any, that was no excuse to be so damned snippy to others.
It was time for the fall board meeting. Peter sat on the flight home to Stockholm and read Fortune magazine to get into the right mood for Great Escape. You needed to ‘know your target group’, as his dad used to say. And he wasn’t so dumb that he didn’t realize by the time he was 20 that in order to meet ‘the most well-to-do one per cent of the population, which engages in conspicuous consumption,’ you needed to hang around Stureplan and do exactly that, engage in conspicuous consumption.
Peter remembered as if it were yesterday the very rewarding conversation he had had with his father, which had resulted in him getting a corporate American Express card, and the many hysterical party nights and high-status contacts that the card had financed. Not to mention all the girls he had raked in – good-looking, young, rich and generous, he could pick and choose among hundreds of Stureplan wannabes.
Then things had got a little out of hand. When Peter started racking up charges in excess of 300,000 kronor but only delivering a few vague contacts, Lennart immediately pulled the credit card, thus ending his triumphal march among the cream of Stureplan. Peter had always suspected that it was his Uncle Ernst, finance officer at a large bank and chair of the board of his father’s company, who had called his little brother’s attention to the cost of Peter’s networking. Ernst talked all the time about what the accountants would say. But it didn’t feel completely wrong to give up the slicked-back hairstyle and expensive clothes and move up to northern Sweden to study. Peter had honestly begun to tire of spraying girls with 10,000-kronor bottles of champagne. Been there, done that, Peter thought. The feeling was just, ‘Yeah, okay, now what?’ In any case, he thought it was more fun with girls who found him attractive regardless of his father’s money.
For a while Lennart had been furious. Now it had faded into a permanent disappointment, and Peter only got paid for his participation on the Board or if he did other work. In Umeå Peter tried to show that he was a Stavenius – damned right he could also finish a ‘character-building period of studies’ in a crowded dormitory with poorly installed vinyl flooring, furniture that was both old and disgusting, and a shared kitchen in which people warmed all kinds of stuff in the toaster. But compared to Charlie, Ernst’s son, who was independent and earned big bucks in finance, Peter fell short. These days Lennart had a skeptical attitude to his son’s merits, and he didn’t hesitate to tell Peter all about cousin Charlie’s success in London. And Charlie was only five years older than Peter. The latest was that Charlie seemed to be on his way to earning a bonus this year that was as big as Great Escape’s entire profit. The jealousy was never expressed, but it was palpable, a restless dissatisfaction. Peter didn’t know if it was because Lennart felt himself inappropriately outdistanced by his young nephew, or if it was simply a disappointment to have the less successful offspring. Whatever its cause, the situation hurt Peter more than he was willing to admit.
Peter flipped distractedly through Fortune and suddenly saw Lennart in the ad for Rolex watches again. ‘To accomplish extraordinary things.’ Perhaps it wasn’t as easy as Peter used to think? Lennart made it clear to Peter that he shouldn’t count on being supported, that he needed to get serious and do something sensible with his life. ‘Do something sensible’ was code for following in Lennart’s footsteps – get a degree in economics, enter the labor market and start making good business deals. By the time cousin Charlie was 25 years old, he had already made his first million, entirely on his own.
When he arrived at Strand Street, Peter entered the code and stepped into the office. He no longer noticed the beautiful vaulted ceiling and the row of crystal chandeliers. He greeted Barbro, Lennart’s proper secretary, who had worked for the family since they had been in the interiors business. He walked across designer carpets and passed racks with exclusively designed Great Escape catalogues. At the far end of the office was the boardroom, with its thick wall-to-wall carpeting, large oval mahogany table and gold-framed diplomas that the company and Lennart had received over the years – ‘Exporter of the Year,’ ‘Businessman of the Year’ and ‘Sweden’s Super Gazelle 2005’.
As Peter greeted all the dark-suited men, he suddenly felt out of place in his grey blazer. Strangely, back at the dorm it had made him feel too dressed up. Dark suit, he thought: I need to get one. He discreetly wrote a note to himself on the yellow notepad in his board-meeting file folder, while the introductory formalities went on in the background – approval of the agenda, minutes from the last meeting… He woke up a bit during the quarterly report and concurred when the board members noted with satisfaction that the company was growing well in the US; their recruitments seemed to have been successful, and the New York office was proving to be a profitable investment.
The next agenda item was about a proposed investment. Lennart went through the travel company’s current destinations before quickly getting to the point. He wanted to purchase two Eurocopter Dauphins – monster helicopters that could carry up to 12 passengers at high speeds. Peter knew that under the existing investment ceiling set by the board of directors, the CEO could unilaterally approve expenditures up to 10 million. So that meant that these machines went for more than that.
Uncle Ernst, the chairman of the board, asked why their regular, one-motor helicopters weren’t sufficient. Did the company really need all five of them in Europe? Couldn’t a couple be transferred to New York? Ernst was always careful that the company’s fixed assets were being put to work; he had seen too many companies fail due to exorbitant capital costs. He referred to it as being ‘weighed down’.
Peter thought that Uncle Ernst and his boring questions probably had something to do with Great Escape’s success, even if it was the charismatic little brother who drove the company’s development and stood in the spotlight. Because it was now that Lennart was most alive; Peter saw the fire in his father’s eyes when he talked inspiringly about Great Escape’s new offer – a grizzly bear hunt with a private helicopter direct from Manhattan! The latest market survey from New York had shown that people were willing to pay a lot for that type of exclusive trip, and advance sales had been fantastic. These two-motored behemoths could fly sufficiently fast and safely in all weathers so the Wall Street elite could get to Alaska for a long weekend to hunt ‘one of the world’s most formidable predators’.
Not as formidable as the Wall Street elite, Peter thought with a grin.
‘What do you say, Peter?’ Lennart looked at his son as if he had just made a statement.
‘What is all this based on?’ Peter looked almost dazedly at the CEO and Board in front of him. A feeling of déjà vu crept up on him from somewhere.
‘Uh?’ Lennart looked at him as if he had said staphylococcus.
‘Why is this a good idea?’ continued Peter, now completely engulfed in a time-bridging Matrix feeling.
The chair of the board glanced approvingly at his nephew. This was actually an Ernst-type question.
Lennart irritatedly noted his older brother’s expression and answered sharply, ‘18,000 dollars per paying customer, and demand exists!’
Peter was pulled out of the odd, unfamiliar mood and he smiled crookedly, ‘Oh, right – why didn’t you say so?’